LITERARY FICTION
BLACK WATER by Louise Doughty (Faber £12.99)
JOHN HARPER lies awake in a hillside hut in Bali awaiting his fate. Will the men with machetes come tonight, or will they wait for the rain?
Harper, it becomes clear, is a kind of mercenary who has not only outlived his usefulness, but is burdened with some very dark secrets indeed.
The narrative moves between the Sixties and the Nineties, with Harper’s conflicted childhood in the Netherlands and California, then his career in Indonesia.
But the central drama turns on the coup and counter-coup of 1965, which led to the deaths of some one million Indonesians in the fight against Communism, much of it orchestrated by the CIA.
While this little-known slice of tragic history is the backdrop, the central character of Harper, the eternal outsider, the man in a moral vacuum, is skilfully drawn and compelling.
When we meet him in 1998, he is mortally afraid that his past will catch up with him, just as he seems to have been offered the chance of a new life with a new woman. When we leave him, in that same Bali hut, we still cannot be sure which fate beckons.
This serious novel marks a departure for Doughty, whose psychological thrillers, including Apple Tree Yard, have been so successful. This one strays more into le Carré territory — where she seems equally at home.
CONRAD AND ELEANOR by Jane Rogers (Atlantic Books £12.99)
IN THE beginning, it seemed as though they could have it all: two successful scientific careers, four children and a reasonably affluent lifestyle.
Thirty years or so later, Eleanor — the shiny, driven, ambitious one — is forging ahead successfully with her career, has taken a lover and barely notices that Conrad, who willingly took on the domestic duties and role of the children’s chief carer, sits miserably home alone each evening, mulling over his declining and morally questionable career involving animal experiments.
Then, after failing to come home from a science conference in Munich, Conrad disappears. It takes Eleanor a couple of days to take this seriously but, when she does, she is forced to re-evaluate their long marriage and look into the dusty corners of their relationship that she hasn’t had time to sweep.
This is a really clever, reflective and dispassionate scrutiny of a marriage in trouble.
THE CRIME WRITER by Jill Dawson (Sceptre £18.99)
DAWSON often draws on real people for inspiration in her novels, and this one is no exception. Here, she takes the fascinating character of the legendary crime novelist Patricia Highsmith as both a subject for biographical scrutiny and the protagonist of an imagined story, in which Highsmith crosses the line between writing about murderers and becoming one herself.
The setting is rural Suffolk in 1964. Highsmith is hiding out, furiously writing and conducting both a secretive affair with a married woman in London (similar to the eponymous Carol, of the film based on her book The Price Of Salt) and a tender friendship with Ronald Blythe, the author of Akenfield. So far, so true.
But Dawson’s Pat is also obsessed with what it would be like to actually kill someone, and she has someone particular in mind. A beautifully crafted and utterly riveting blend of fact and fiction about a fascinating 20th-century figure.